BioVis – Design contest on RNA secondary structure visualization

When we compared the secondary structures of the non-coding RNA HAR1 between primate species and wanted to represent our results at Bia’s poster at the ISMB conference this year, we realized that it is quite challenging to find a good visualization that supports a comparison between structures. In a pub in Boston, Jan Aerts, Bia Walter, Henrike Indrischek, and I sketched this challenge on a napkin. Gratefully, Ryo Sakai and Eamonn Maguire developed our idea into the official design contest for the BioVis conference 2015 in Dublin. We are very excited to see what solutions the contestants will come up with.